“Oh, boy!” Skippy said then, because that was almost too much.
“But,” Jibby went on, “you fellows don’t need to exercise your noses that way because they don’t amount to much as jibs, anyway.”
“I’ll say mine don’t,” said Wampus, touching his pug.
“No,” said Jibby seriously. “I’ve often felt sorry for you, Wampus; having a stub like that. But it’s a good nose for smelling with, if you train it right. It ought to be a quick smeller—a lot quicker than mine—because it is so short. Smells ought to get in quicker. The only trouble is that you don’t any of you know how to smell.”
“You don’t have to know how to smell things,” said Tad. “You just smell them, and that’s all there is to it; you can’t help smelling them.”
“Did you ever read James Latimer’s book called ‘Odors and How to Improve the Sense of Smell’?” Jibby asked.
“No,” we all said.
“Neither did I,” said Jibby. “I never even heard of it, because there isn’t any such book, but there might be. Maybe I’ll write one myself, sometime. The trouble with you fellows is that you don’t think about your noses. I do think about mine; I think a lot about it. I can’t help thinking about it, there’s such a lot of it.”
That was true, anyway.
“You fellows just go around smelling what happens to come to you to be smelled,” Jibby went on. “You can tell a violet from a fish by the smell of it, maybe, but you don’t exercise your smelling apparatus. Can you tell the difference between a channel catfish and a mud catfish when they are down under the water ten feet or so?”
“No, and nobody can. Nobody can even smell a fish when it is under water,” said Wampus. “Can you?”
“No matter!” said Jibby, sort of tossing his head. “What I say is that, if people trained their noses and exercised their smelling powers properly, they might smell smells that they don’t even imagine they can smell now. That stands to reason. There are dozens of kinds of violets, but the most that most people can tell when they smell a violet is that it is a violet. A botanist, that has trained his nose to smell violets and knows there are dozens of different kinds of violets, gets so, after a while, he can tell most of them from the others just by the smell. And it is that way with everything.”
“Well, what good does it do?” asked Skippy.
“Everything you know does some good,” said Jibby. “That’s what knowing things is for, to do us good. It is just the ‘little bit more’ that makes anything the ‘most’ instead of leaving it the ‘least.’ ”
“I guess that’s so,” I said. “It’s partly because Wampus knows a little bit more about fishing than we do that he wins the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize every year.”
“You mean he can smell the fish when they are under water?” Jibby asked.
“Pshaw, no!” said Skippy. “That’s nonsense.”
“Is it?” Jibby asked, grinning a little.
“Well, if it isn’t,” said Skippy, “why don’t you go in for the Uncle Oscar Prize this year?”
“Oh, I oughtn’t to do that,” Jibby said. “It wouldn’t be fair. What if I could smell the fish when they are under water? I’d know where all the fish were and you fellows that belong on the island here wouldn’t have a chance. No, I’d better not compete for that prize; I’d win it sure.”
VI
The Prize-Winner
Well, we all laughed! It was a little too ridiculous, the solemn way in which Jibby said he would be sure to win the prize. We had all tried to win the prize, and we knew no one but Wampus could win it; he was just a natural-born fisher and couldn’t be beat.
“Oh, very well, then,” Jibby said, pretending to be offended. “Just for that I will try to win it, and I will win it. I’m sorry to take it away from Wampus, but I’ll have to do it.”
We all laughed again.
“I suppose,” Tad said to Jibby, “you’ll go right home and give your nose some extra exercise now, won’t you?”
“Well, if you see me doing queer things with the old jib, don’t be surprised,” Jibby said.
The next few days, though, we certainly began to be worried and to think there might be something in what Jibby had more than hinted to us. He did some mighty queer things, and we watched him do them. He would stand with his nose in the air and sniff. He would stand with his nose up and sniff four or five times, and then turn his head just an inch and sniff four or five times more, and then turn his head again and sniff again, and so on. Sometimes he would pull a blade of grass and sniff at one end of it and then turn it around and sniff at the other end, and keep this up five minutes at a time.
Then he began sniffing the old Mississippi River. He would lie in a skiff with his head over the edge and his nose close to the water and sniff. Then he would get on the seat and row a distance and lie down and sniff again. A few minutes later, we caught him with fish scales, sniffing them one after another—a bass scale and a perch scale and a piece of channel catfish skin and a piece of mud catfish tail, and so on. Then, while we watched him, he put them one at
